Andy James

wandering the web since 1997

Presbyterian minister in Atlanta.
Music lover.
Found beer in seminary.

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A New Vision of Eternal Life

By

a sermon on Revelation 21:1-6
preached on April 24, 2016, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

As most of you know, I spend most Tuesday evenings singing with the New Amsterdam Singers. At one level, this is not a particularly surprising extracurricular activity for a pastor. The church has been involved in singing since before its beginning, and the choral repertoire was built on the music of the church almost exclusively until the last couple centuries, so even in our secular chorus we sing a lot of music that is built on the same topics and themes that I deal with in my day job!

A few weeks ago, as we began rehearsing the music for our May concert, I noted that one of our pieces had a surprising religious content. As I looked at it more closely, I discovered that its words were written by the great hymnodist Charles Wesley, the author of some of the great hymns of our faith such as “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling,” “Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus,” “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing,” and “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing.” As a nonsectarian chorus with many nonreligious members, we certainly aren’t singing this piece for the meaning of its words—yet as I read and sang along, the pastor in me couldn’t help but cringe a bit at the theology in them. The words focus on the promise of new life in a world yet to come, insisting over and over:

I’ll sing hallelujah
And you’ll sing hallelujah
And we’ll all sing hallelujah
When we arrive at home.

I wasn’t particularly excited about calling life in the world to come “home,” but then we came to the last verse:

Give joy or grief, give ease or pain,
Take life or friends away,
But let me find them all again
In that eternal day.

This idea of “going home” to be reunited with long-lost friends and loved ones when we die has bothered me for a long time. For all the emphasis that we put on the afterlife as Christians, the Bible is surprisingly unclear about exactly what will happen when we die. In what it does say, I can find little or no suggestion that we will be reunited with loved ones or given a more perfect version of the life we have known in this world, with exactly the same relationships and way of life we have enjoyed here.

Our reading this morning from Revelation gives us one of the clearest biblical views of what is ahead, insisting that there is an entirely different kind of world yet to come, “a new heaven and a new earth,” that is not about meeting our own individual needs, giving us a happy heavenly home, or restoring our individual lives to the way we might imagine them to be perfect. Instead, Revelation insists that our hope for life beyond what we know now is rooted in God bringing about a new creation where the things that make for destruction in the world are themselves destroyed.

For a book that is filled with mystery and uncertainty, this vision from Revelation is surprisingly clear. There is a new and different heaven and earth, for the old ones have been destroyed to make way for something entirely new. The capstone of this new creation, the holy city Jerusalem, comes down out of the new heaven to the new earth, ready and waiting to be made one with God. And not only does this holy city emerge from heaven, it also becomes the home of God and humanity, the common dwelling place of the Creator and the Created.

As these things come together to live in new ways, they take on new qualities. God will wipe every tear from the eyes of God’s people. “Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more,” for the ways of life that have enabled these things of death to persist will themselves die. If all that were not enough to convince us of the hope and wonder of this vision of John, this moment closes with confident and hopeful words offered by none less than the one on the throne:

See, I am making all things new….
To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life.

This vision of a new heaven and new earth seems a good bit different from the sort of thing promised to us in the world to come by Charles Wesley and so many others. There’s no mention of reunification with long-dead friends and family, no chance for conversation with philosophers, theologians, and notable persons of different eras, no place for personal rejoicing about all the individual afflictions that no longer mark our days. Instead, there is a simple new creation marked by the absence of death, mourning, crying, and pain—but even more by the presence of God in everything.

This vision is further marked by the reality that these things are not about individual happiness but rather the transformation of the world. The things ahead offer us the world as God intends, setting aside the human destruction of sinfulness that has taken hold of things, reclaiming the way of life in wholeness, hope, and peace for all people that God set forth from the very beginning. The deep relationships of the world ahead come not from being reunited with people that we have known before but from the fullness of life that comes when we can finally dwell without fear in the closeness of God. And the wonder of things ahead will not be built on some foreign, distant understanding of things but on the very creation that we know and love now, restored and transformed with love and hope to be as God intends.

So what does all this mean? Why is it important to set aside a popular understanding of heaven for this more biblical way of looking at things? What difference does it make for us to get what we believe in line with what scripture promises us is ahead? After all, if we recognize that all these things are a mystery to begin with, doesn’t that mean that it is okay for us to go on believing the wrong things about them since it doesn’t matter anyway?

Maybe so. Maybe it really isn’t all that important to worry a lot about what we believe will come in the days after we die. Maybe the differences here really aren’t that big of a deal. Maybe all this is just a question of theology that doesn’t really matter for our everyday lives.

But I am not convinced that we can set this question aside so easily. The reality is that what we believe about the days to come affects how we live here and now. For far too long, Christians used the promise of a better world to come as an excuse for not doing anything about the problems of this world. Slaveholders justified claiming ownership of other human beings by claiming that they were introducing their slaves to a way of life that would enable them to enjoy eternal life in the next world even as they were treated like nothing more than property in this world. The rich and powerful have over and over written off their responsibility for the poor in this world by proclaiming a gospel of hope grounded in the next—with no change in the ways of this one. And Christians have used fear of missing out of the glories of eternal life to destroy the fullness of the image of God in far too many people who live and love differently from what seems to be the norm. If the focus of our hope for the world to come is on our individual lives, on “find[ing] [life or friends] all again / in that eternal day,” then our hope for God’s future is centered in our own desires rather than being rooted in the mutual flourishing of all creation.

Those different ways of thinking bring very different ways of living. If we are focused only on ourselves and the things we want to be different in our eternal life, we ignore the consequences of our actions in the lives of others. We miss the many signs of brokenness in our world that go beyond the immediacy of our individual lives. And we dishonor God’s clear instruction to love our neighbors as ourselves, in this world and the next.

But when we recognize that the things ahead are about the transformation of all creation, we join God in living the resurrection of Christ today, in declaring that evil has been defeated once and for all in Christ, in welcoming others to share the wondrous gift of life that is promised for us in this world and the next, and in proclaiming in our words, in our deeds, and in our lives that God is making all things new.

So may God give us a new vision of eternal life, marked not so much by the things ahead for each one of us but by the wonder of the kingdom of God that includes all creation, that we might celebrate at this table as people who will share this even greater feast even as we join God in working in these days to make all things new in Jesus Christ our risen Lord. Lord, come quickly! Alleluia! Amen.

Singing About the Shepherd

By

a sermon on Psalm 23
preached on April 17, 2016, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

There’s something unusual and special about Psalm 23. These incredible words that we just sang manage to touch our lives in ways that we just can’t imagine—especially for the city dwellers among us who have never even once seen a sheep or a shepherd!

There are so many wonderful settings of this psalm, both spoken and sung. My friend Michael Morgan, a collector of translations of the Bible and especially of psalters, or translations and paraphrases of the psalms, shared with me a lecture he offered recently on Psalm 23 to the good people of Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia, the congregation where former President Jimmy Carter worships and teaches Sunday school. In his lecture, Michael offered dozens of translations of this beloved psalm, wandering through centuries of English poetry and prose to describe in words ancient and new the wonder of our shepherding God. For centuries, great poets would offer their own translations and paraphrases of this psalm, mining these incredible lines for deeper meaning. Among all the translations and paraphrases shared by Michael in his lecture, including one that can be sung to the tune of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” I had a difficult time deciding which ones to share with you, but I did decide on three that seemed appropriate for this day when we consider these beloved words anew.

First comes one that Michael describes as “the worst”—and I would agree—from The Politically Correct Jargon Version:

It is an ongoing deductible fact
that your inter-relational empathetical and non-vengeance capabilities
will retain me as their target focus
for the duration of my non-death period,
and I will possess tenant rights in the housing unit of the Lord
on a permanently open-ended time basis.

I can only offer one word: yikes.

Then there is a lovely paraphrase by contemporary poet Marjorie Gray:

Divine Guardian, You care for us;
You provide all we need, and more,
taking us to serene, green places
where we are refreshed to the core.

You show us Right Ways,
trails Your Ranger blazed.
Not even death’s gloom traumatizes us
on the path to Your Lighthouse.

We are safe and strong:
with so-called enemies
You invite us to feast, carefree,
blessed with effervescent health.

Your passionate compassion
always invigorates us;
we’ll be Down Home forever
with You, Joyful Peacemaker.

Finally, there is a lovely paraphrase by 17th century poet Samuel Woodford that begins:

The mighty God, who all things does sustain,
That God, who nothing made in vain,
Who nothing that He made did e’er disdain;
The mighty God my Shepherd is,
He is my Shepherd, I His sheep,
Both He is mine and I am His;
About His flock, He constant watch does keep;
When God provides, poor man can nothing need,
And He, who hears young ravens cry,
His sheep will feed.

Yet all these wonderful poetic settings so easily miss that these words of Psalm 23, like all the psalms, were meant to be sung. We don’t know exactly how the ancient Hebrew people sang the psalms. Modern musical notation has only developed in the last six hundred years, and so the original tunes are long lost.

Modern-day composers and churches have taken several different approaches to singing the psalms. First there is the metrical paraphrase, much like our last hymn. These have a regular meter that can easily fit words to tunes that might even be familiar from other hymns. In many quarters of the church after the Reformation, including in our own parent churches of Scotland and Switzerland, the only music that was allowed was sung settings of the psalms like these—never accompanied, always as simple as possible—and some churches even keep up this practice today. As an example of these sorts of psalms, let’s sing the first verse of my friend Michael Morgan’s own paraphrase of Psalm 23 as found in your bulletin.

As faithful shepherds tend their flocks,
So God will care for me;
And from God’s store of grace my needs
Are met abundantly.
In pastures green, by waters still,
My soul new life does take;
And in the paths of righteousness
I follow, for God’s sake.

Other sung settings of the psalms use a refrain and then a chanted tone, like setting two in your bulletin. This particular setting uses a portion of a hymn tune as the refrain, but the chanted part that follows is a little different, as it has no written rhythm but rather follows the natural rhythm of the words.

(No recording of this setting seems to be available online.)

Building on these sorts of responsive, chanted psalms, some contemporary composers have offered their own settings of the psalms, with simple, repeated refrains and fully composed music for the verses. This style came into its own after Vatican II in the Roman Catholic Church in the 1960s, as traditional Latin liturgical music became less important and the church sought out new ways to sing the traditional portions of the service. One of my favorites actually has made it into our hymnal at #473. Let’s turn there and sing it together.

 

There are hundreds more sung settings of Psalm 23, reflecting not just the deep love of this psalm in the lives of people of faith but also the incredible possibilities of interpretation found in these words. As my friend Michael Morgan put it so well,

In this broad variety of words, translators have expressed the endless season we will enjoy in God’s presence, as sheep with a faithful Shepherd, or as Isaac Watts identifies each of us, ‘No more a stranger or a guest, But like a child at home.’

As a final view of these incredible words in song, I invite you to join me in singing an incredible and relatively new setting of Psalm 23 by Presbyterian composer Hal Hopson, setting words from the 1650 Scottish Psalter to a soaring responsive tune.

(No recording of this setting seems to be available online.)

So may God inspire us all our days by the knowledge of our mighty and loving shepherd who surrounds us with faithfulness, love, and hope as all things are made new in Jesus Christ our risen Lord. Thanks be to God! Amen.

A Strange and Wonderful Meal

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a sermon on Luke 24:13-35
preached on April 3, 2016, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone
There are a multitude of ways to spend time with people you enjoy. You might go to dinner and a movie—in a theater or in someone’s home. If you happen to live in New York City and have the budget for it, you might go see a Broadway show, a ballet, an opera, or some other cultural event. You might get together at someone’s house for a meal, some conversation, and maybe a game of some sort. And depending on your interests, you might go to a sporting event of some sort or wander around a museum together.

My two favorite options, though, are a little different. For me, there’s nothing quite like taking a walk or sharing a meal. The conversation that comes even in quiet as you wander the streets or parks of our city connects us with one another. Conversation flows, ideas are exchanged, and something special happens as we spend time together. Then, in those times when we sit at table together, we find a strange presence in our midst, as walls of division are broken down and the connection among those present deepens all the more.

Rembrandt?, The Walk to Emmaus

Maybe my appreciation of shared walks and meals with friends is rooted in our resurrection story from Luke this morning. The story of Easter morning that we heard last Sunday offers us a clear proclamation of the resurrection, but we never actually see Jesus alive again. The only evidence of the resurrection is an empty tomb, and that could be caused by so many things other than resurrection. So with the proof of this strange event limited to a missing body, Jesus’ disciples start to move on with their lives, scattering from Jerusalem in disbelief as they start to figure out what they will do without their beloved teacher and friend.

Two of them then set out on the road to the village Emmaus, a seven-mile journey from Jerusalem, easily reachable on foot in a somewhat leisurely afternoon journey. The conversation naturally turned to everything that they had experienced together over the last week—the triumphant arrival of Jesus into Jerusalem as the people cried out “Hosanna,” the challenging teachings that Jesus had offered in the temple, the Passover meal that they had shared, the arrest and trial of their friend, the chants of the crowd to “crucify him,” the sentence of death urged on by religious leaders and proclaimed by the Roman governor, the strange events at Golgotha as Jesus was crucified, the placement of his body in a simple, new tomb, and now the reports that his body had gone missing so quickly.

As they walked and talked, another man joined them on the road, joining in their surely animated conversation, asking them, “What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?” His question stopped them in their tracks as it all soaked in. Their journey with Jesus had begun somewhat unexpectedly as they stepped away from their families and homes and livelihoods because there was something compelling about his message. They had taken him seriously when he invited them—maybe even insisted to them—to set everything aside and follow him. Their worlds had been turned upside down by this journey, this message, this man. And now, after an eventful week, they found their world turned upside down once again because he was no longer with them. So this strange man’s question came as a real surprise. He forced them to take stock of their emotions and lives for the first time in light of everything that had happened—and they quite literally stopped in their tracks.

As they began to answer this stranger’s question and walk along together again, the disciples told this stranger about their friend Jesus, about their hopes for him, about the death that he had experienced, and about the empty tomb that the women had found that very morning. Even though the stranger said he had not heard anything about what had happened to Jesus, he soon began to explain everything that they had told him about, interpreting everything that had happened in light of the scriptures that they all knew so very well. The conversation flowed, and the disciples came to a deeper understanding of everything that they had experienced.

46the_road_to_emmaus

He Qi, The Road to Emmaus

When the afternoon came to an end and the disciples reached their destination in Emmaus, the stranger “walked ahead as if he were going on.” But they were insistent:

Stay with us,
because it is almost evening
and the day is now nearly over.

Convinced by the logic of their argument and the lengthening shadows all around them, the stranger joined the disciples for the night. When they sat down at the table to share the evening meal, though, everything shifted once again. The guest became the host, blessing and breaking the bread, inviting them to share in a feast beyond their knowing. Suddenly the disciples recognized that the stranger who had been with them all afternoon was none other than the risen and living Jesus himself!

Just as quickly as they had recognized him, he vanished from their sight. They began to wonder and question and ask,“Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” They immediately set out for Jerusalem again, ignoring their own advice to the stranger that it was too late to be traveling—their joy was too great, and they had to share this news with the other disciples! When they arrived there, they learned that Peter had also seen Jesus alive again, and “they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.”

This incredible, life-changing, world-shattering walk and meal marked a dramatic shift for the disciples as they went from skeptics to witnesses of the resurrection in the time it took for an afternoon walk and an evening meal. We can join in this walk, this meal, and this transformation for ourselves as we make our way through these Easter days.

Fritz von Uhde, Road to Emmaus

Fritz von Uhde, Road to Emmaus

First, we are invited to join the disciples in sharing the stories of our walks with Jesus in the journeys of our lives. We can bear witness to the ways that we have been changed by our encounters with the story of Jesus’ life and ministry as we walk with others along the way. We can talk with one another about how the experiences of Christ in our world have changed us and opened us to new and different ways of seeing and living in the world. And we can explore how the stories of Jesus’ life and ministry connect us with one another and with Christ as we walk this way together.

Then, we can gather at table for this meal as we look for the presence of Christ in our midst. We can open the doors to this feast wide so that all may know the kind of welcome that God offers here. We can come here expecting that Christ will meet us and be made known to us in the breaking of the bread, just as he was to the disciples on that first Easter evening. And we can trust that the feast we share here opens us to a great feast yet to come, to the feast on God’s holy mountain, “a feast of rich food, a feast of well- aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well- aged wines strained clear.”

These journeys and these meals are then the openings for us of the deeper, broader, wider transformation of the world. Just like the disciples, our worlds are turned upside down by the journeys and the meals that show us the resurrection. We cannot meet the risen Christ along the road or at the table and be the same. We cannot claim the resurrection as our own and live as if Jesus’ death matters more than his new life. We cannot claim a meal of new life here at this table and live as if nothing has changed. And we cannot go forth into the world to hear and see and witness the resurrection for ourselves if all that we are looking for is life beyond death for ourselves.

So as we make our way to this strange and wonderful meal today, as we journey forth into the world to walk with one another and quite likely with Jesus himself, may we know the presence of the risen Christ among us so that we can be a part of his work of transformation in our world and as all things are being made new.

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia! Amen.

Looking for the Living Among the Living

By

a sermon on Luke 24:1-12
preached on Easter Sunday, March 27, 2016, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

IMG_1221

Why do you look for the living among the dead?

This strange question surely startled the women who had come to the tomb on that first Easter morning. After all, they were looking for a dead man. They had watched with their own eyes as Jesus had been executed just two days earlier. They had seen the tomb and how his body was laid there by Joseph of Arimathea. They knew that Jesus, their friend and teacher, was dead. So when they showed up on that Sunday morning to find the stone rolled away and his body missing, they knew that something was up, but nothing was resolved by two men telling them that they were looking in the wrong place!

Why do you look for the living among the dead?

This strange question from two men in dazzling clothes at the tomb set the stage for everything that followed. “He is not here, but has risen,” they announced. This was strange, unexpected news—while Jesus had told them that this would be coming, even these very faithful women had forgotten about it. Their sabbath day had been filled with mourning for their friend, with preparing spices and ointments for the time when they would offer their final respects to his body, with all the other things that needed to be done when a good friend dies, and they had forgotten that this might not have been the end of the story for Jesus after all. It took these two men in dazzling clothes to jog their memory a bit, to remind them that Jesus had told them “that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.” But as soon as they remembered, they saw only that their search for Jesus had just begun.

Why do you look for the living among the dead?

After being confronted with this strange question and reminded that Jesus had told them that this would not be the end of the story, the women started to think about where Jesus might be. So they made their way back to the other disciples, to the core group of men who had journeyed with him along the way, hoping that these other friends might join them in sorting out what was next. But the disciples thought all this an “idle tale” and dismissed this word outright. Jesus was dead, and they knew it. They had seen it for themselves, and the strange rantings of some women about a missing body were nothing more than rumors of grave robbers. Peter was the only one who even thought this report was worthy of investigation, but even when he found the tomb empty except for the linen cloths that had wrapped Jesus’ body, he went home in amazement.

This first proclamation of the resurrection ends with no report of Jesus actually being seen alive and only a vague hope that this story would end with anything more than an empty tomb and a missing body. The search for Jesus ended before it ever really began—it seems that they really did know only how to look for the living among the dead.

Why do you look for the living among the dead?

This strange question first posed to the women on that Easter morning echoes across the ages to us, too. It is quite fitting that one of the abiding traditions of this day is the Easter egg hunt, when we seek out hidden things, for the good news of the resurrection on this Easter Day demands that we seek the risen Christ in our world.

But this search inevitably leads us to the same places as the women and the disciples, looking for the living among the dead. Have we gone to the tombs of our world—the old ways of doing things, the memories of past glory, the preserved remains of days long since gone—expecting to find new life? Who have we met when we have gone there? Have any “men in dazzling clothes” helped to point us in a different direction? Or have the main people we have encountered along the way told us that our reports of new life are nothing more than an “idle tale?” Some days we may be better at seeking Jesus out in our world than others—some Easter egg hunts are easier than others, after all!—but it is so easy to end up with the women and the disciples, looking for the living among the dead.

Why do you look for the living among the dead?

The search for the living Christ in our midst isn’t always easy, after all. First, we have to get past the death and destruction and darkness that surround us. We certainly must mourn the pain and hurt of our lives and our world. We cannot ignore the realities of fear and anxiety that creep insidiously into our lives day after day, building up as reports of terrorism and death swirl around us, taking hold as too many who lead us or seek to lead us seize on our fears to exclude some of God’s beloved children from the fullness of God’s care and protection. And we cannot ignore the tragedies that strike our lives in ways and times that we least expect that force us to reorient ourselves to a different way of life.

Faced with all these moments of death, surrounded by destruction and darkness, it is difficult to imagine where we might look for new life. So when we do decide that we want to set out on the journey to find the risen Jesus, we tend to go looking for him in the places we know best, where we have seen him before, where life is comfortable and simple, where new life bursts forth in grand and glorious moments with loud trumpets and bold proclamations.

But if the experience of the women and the disciples is any guide, we are likely to be left wandering if we look only here. Instead, our search for Jesus must take us to some different kinds of places along the way. We might need to go some places we have not been before. We might need to seek out places where there is life abundant, places where people are showing care and love for one another, places where the barriers of this world are being broken down and we are invited to live together in new ways, places where light quietly and slowly—yet surely—streams into darkness to make it clear that death will never have the final word. We might need to seek out Jesus among those he called “the least of these”—among the poor and outcast, among the hungry and thirsty, among strangers and refugees and prisoners, among all who are rejected and despised by the world and so are especially made welcome by God. And in our search for the risen Christ in our world, we might need to make our way to this table, to this place where Luke tells us the disciples finally met him alive again, where their eyes were opened and they recognized him in the breaking of bread.

Why do you look for the living among the dead?

Friends, as we seek the risen Christ in these Easter days, may God guide us to look for the living among the living, to open our eyes to the places and ways that Jesus is alive in our world where we might least expect it, to walk in our world in ways that show that death does not and will not have the final word, and to serve in love so that all can see the risen Christ among us as we offer his hope to those in greatest need, until he comes again in glory and all creation joins in his resurrection life forever and ever.

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia! Amen.

Filled with Grace

By

a sermon on 2 Corinthians 5:16-21 and Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
preached on March 6, 2016, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

One of the most amazing things about the Bible is the way the same stories manage to slip into our lives over and over again. Somehow this great collection of writings manages to carry some sort of meaning in every generation. When things in the world are changing, these ancient stories still speak to our present realities. When the situations in our lives shift for one reason or another, these same stories take on new meaning for us. And when we need comfort amid turmoil in our lives, these stories give us hope for God’s presence through it all.

We need look no further than our reading from Luke this morning for a perfect example of all these things. The parable of the prodigal son told by Jesus in Luke 15 manages to use the same words to speak volumes of meaning into radically different times and places. Every time I turn to this text, I am reminded of something different about who God is.  Each time I hear these words, I get a glimpse of the many different ways God loves us. And each time I hear this story, I find myself entering into the parable from a different perspective—some days it is as the younger son, some days as the older, some days as some other minor character around the edges of it all, some days even the father.

Wherever we enter this incredible story, though, from whichever viewpoint seems clearest to us in this particular moment, we gain a glimpse of the grace of God streaming into our world in all time. Grace permeates every moment of this parable. Even the setting for its telling is a moment for grace—Jesus had stirred up trouble with the Pharisees and scribes because of the company he kept, because he welcomed tax collectors and sinners and ate with them, so he wanted to help them understand why he responded to their gracelessness with compassion.

The story, like the setting of its telling, is filled with moments of gracelessness. It opens with the younger son showing no grace whatsoever as he asks to receive his inheritance while his father is still alive. It is as if the son told his father that he was as good as dead to him, that he was worth nothing more to him than the value of the things that he owned. The father had the opportunity to respond with the same lack of grace that was shown him, but he chose to give his son what he asked for.

As the son wandered the surrounding lands and squandered his inheritance, he experienced a similar lack of grace like what he offered to his father from those he encountered. The people of his new homeland saw no reason to show this stranger in their midst any sort of grace. They treated him solely as a hired hand, leaving him to fend for himself in the midst of a severe famine, not even suggesting that he ought to take some of the food that he was feeding to the pigs to sustain himself. The son showed so little grace to himself along the way, too. He counted himself so worthless that he would not even be treated as a son by his father, that his father’s grace toward him had long run out, that he was so deeply undeserving of any care other than as a hired hand.

Amid all the gracelessness of this story, the younger son’s return home was filled with great grace. His father’s grace upon his return was so abundant and so much at the ready that he seemed to be on the lookout for his son’s return each and every day, and so he ran to greet him when he saw him from far away. This greeting was not one of stern rebuke but rather warm welcome. Before the son could even finish his carefully rehearsed speech begging for mercy, his father called for a robe, ring, and sandals, then he made plans for a great feast and celebration to welcome the lost son home.

prodigal_son_rembrandt

Rembrandt van Rijn, The Return of the Prodigal Son

Amid all the grace shown in this story, the older brother was not particularly excited about his father’s generous welcome to his deadbeat younger brother—it seems that the deep grace of the father had not been passed down to either one of his sons! But the father would not let his older son’s gracelessness undo the grace that defined his life and he was so willing to share. When the older son protested that he had remained at home, working faithfully and diligently while his brother had “devoured [the] property with prostitutes,” and had enjoyed none of these gifts that had suddenly been showered upon him, the father reminded him that the kind of grace shared with his brother was also shared with him, too, but that this moment was worthy of celebration, for “this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.” No matter how much the older son might try to derail it, no matter how badly the circumstances were set with gracelessness, even no matter how difficult it might be for the younger son to accept it, the father insisted in his words and actions that grace would shine through.

In the end, Jesus’ parable is about grace—grace that gives more than we think we can receive, grace that opens us to a radically different way of relating to God and one another, grace that fills even the most graceless places of our world with God’s mercy, compassion, peace, and life—and this parable helps us to see how that grace can take hold in our lives and our world. When it does, we can do what Paul suggests in our first reading, from now on to “regard no one from a human point of view,” to embrace the new creation that comes to us in Christ, to make our lives marks of reconciliation and grace each and every day.

I suspect none of this made much sense to Jesus’ disciples as he told this parable as he made his way to Jerusalem. They probably grumbled about the kind of people who showed up when Jesus welcomed tax collectors and sinners. The disciples may even have found themselves more in line with the devoted older son, complaining about all the people who managed to join the crowd along the way when they had been with Jesus from the beginning. And while they may have appreciated his pointed criticism of the Pharisees and the scribes, we know that in the end they weren’t quite ready to put their own lives on the line to join him in this message. But as time went on, as the light of the resurrection shone upon them, it all finally began to make sense, for the resurrection of Jesus showed them that his death brought a new meaning of grace to everyone. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus ultimately made it clear that his parables about God’s generosity and grace were not just pipe dreams. No—the grace that the father embodied in this parable was the very same grace that was possible and real for everyone because of the reconciliation made possible in Christ.

As hard as it was for the disciples, living such grace is not easy for us, either. It is so much easier to choose to exclude those people who look or act or live differently than we do, to join the Pharisees and scribes in their grumbling about who gets welcomed in and who gets fed, to be so tightly bound by our rules that we end up like the older son and miss the joy that comes when transformation takes root and hold in our world. As hard as it is to show this grace to others, it can just as difficult to show this grace to ourselves. It is all too easy to end up like these brothers, so stuck in assumptions that we do not merit the generosity of God’s grace because of the depth of our wrongdoing or so mired in the despair of legalism as we focus on our own understanding of doing what is right that we miss the opportunity to share the joyous celebration offered when others come to know God’s grace in new ways. Our humanity makes it all too easy to exclude others and even ourselves from the abundance of this grace, but Jesus’ parable and Paul’s words remind us that this is no longer the way we are to live. We are called to set aside the gracelessness that comes to us so naturally and embrace the abundant grace of God in our lives as we become a part of God’s new creation.

So as we journey through these Lenten days, as we walk with Jesus on the way to the cross, may God show us how to welcome this grace more deeply in our own lives, may God help us to set aside our fears of those who might join us in benefiting from this incredible gift, and may God fill us with grace anew as we see others from this new point of view of mercy, peace, hope, and grace, as together we wait, watch, and work for the new creation to be revealed in our midst by the power of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Lord, come quickly! Amen.